Najoung Kim (Korea)

MSt in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology

I completed my degree in MSt General Linguistics & Comparative Philology in 2015. In my Master's thesis I attempted to propose a fully automated system for discovering novel expressions in a set of texts in comparison to another set of texts. This system also tries to predict how the new expressions were created using linguistic clues. As well as functioning as a useful tool for researchers, the statistics obtained from the system result can be applied to a quantitative measure of innovation and textual characteristics.

In my Master's and undergraduate degrees I have mainly focused on quantifying aspects of natural language and solving Natural Language Processing problems effectively. I have also worked as a visiting researcher in KAIST (South Korea), where I modelled effects of age on semantic fluency and longitudinal effects of dementia on morphology. Currently I am a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University, where I hope to develop computational models of natural language that are cognitively plausible.

Ertegun Programme was the main reason I chose to undertake my postgraduate study in Oxford, and I had a great year - both academically and culturally - at Ertegun House under the support of caring staff and with the company of the student community. I am grateful to Mica and Ahmet Ertegun for the all the opportunities that would not have been given to me without their generosity.